10 Tips for a Successful Online Sale for the Holiday (and any other) Season

10 Tips for a Successful Online Sale for the Holiday (and any other) Season

Last Updated on April 18, 2022

It’s that time of the year again, with back-to-back holidays from Thanksgiving, Christmas to the New Year. It’s a very busy time for businesses trying to cater to the mad holiday rush, and it’s usually difficult to stand out from the crowd, especially for online businesses. We’ve come up with a list of great tips and tools you can use to make your business the go-to this holiday season or any other occasion.

Tip 1: Have a Great Sale Landing Page

Some people think that having a sale just means changing their current prices to sale prices and putting in a big “ON SALE” banner or tag. While this is indeed an essential, maximizing conversion and tracking sale performance entails much more than that.

Your sale landing page should be different from your regular homepage, pricing page or simply any page on your website. This landing page is created for the sole purpose of achieving your main conversion goal – getting people to purchase now! It works as the main information hub of your promotional campaign and has a single CTA that will help funnel and bring a clearer message to your visitors about what you want them to take action on.

The benefit of having a dedicated landing page for your sale is having a specific area where you can highlight what you have to offer. It would be the best opportunity for potential customers to really understand  what they can get. Through your sale page you can clearly show – 

  • What products are on sale
  • What discounts are available
  • Your value proposition
  • The sale period
  • The terms and conditions of the sale
  • FAQs and any other details you want to include

If you think it’s just too hard to start designing and building a sale landing page now, you can easily get one up and running with the Yule UI Kit – a brand new Holiday-themed UI Kit from Stackable – which was released just in time for this Christmas season and the Sol UI Kit – to help you convert more customers during one of the busiest sales of the year.

Design Library

Browse through our design library of 31 UI Kits and over 300 pre-made block designs.

Tip 2: Get Hosting that can Handle the Sale Rush

Sales can be crazy. With everyone rushing to checkout, it is crucial to have a website that performs and has ultra fast page loading speed. No one likes waiting as they purchase from a store, so don’t let your customers experience that on your website too. As much as possible, make sure that you are able to load pages quickly and easily enough to keep people’s attention to allow for real engagement and conversion.

We recommend using an excellent web host such as Kinsta, Bluehost, or Cloudways to boost your website performance and allow it to handle traffic during your holiday sale.

Tip 3: Have an Eye-Catching Pricing Table

All e-commerce sites have pricing tables but you need to make sure to show people the value that you offer. A pricing table should help potential customers see at a glance the offerings available to them; exactly how much and what is part of the package. Be clear and visual with what you’re offering, especially if you are selling gorgeous materials or items.

It’s also a good idea to highlight what the best suitable option since this helps customers digest information more quickly. This will make for an easier decision to buy if the product is exactly what they are looking for.

You may also want to show popular and best value items and put eye-catchers like visual tags to make sure the correct message comes across.

Tip 4: Show a Sale Countdown

All sales are meant to be limited-time offers. Sure, people might know that you have an ongoing sale, but do they know that they need to act soon to actually reap the benefit?

To better entice your interested buyers to go ahead and make a purchase, you can create a sense of urgency through the use of a countdown. Countdowns don’t just help keep potential customers interested, they reinforce the message that time is limited and your offer may not be up for grabs for long.

Countdowns showcase scarcity of the deal and they give an extra push to your potential customers to act NOW. A great countdown plugin you can use with Gutenberg is NotificationX. It’s easy to use and caters to multiple timezones to help you maximize your sale period.

Tip 5: Use Live Chat to Respond to Sale Queries

More often than not, customers will seek more information on your products before they proceed to making a purchase. Because of this, responding quickly and efficiently through live chat definitely helps in conversion. While a contact form can be a good option, it just can’t compare to the engagement that you can achieve with a live chat facility. Having a conversation also allows you to connect with your customers more, which increases customer satisfaction. And happy customers tend to be loyal customers.

While it’s understandable that not everyone has the bandwidth to offer regular live chat support, you might want to consider making an exception during sale periods when time is of the essence. To limit queries to those really interested in your sale offering, you can make the live chat option only available on your sale landing page.

There are different plugins that you can use to add a live chat feature to your website. You can try out the one offered by HubSpot, which is great for organizing your conversations and allows you to assign queries to different team members. This ensures that your team can respond to inquiries as quickly and efficiently as possible. HubSpot’s live chat facility also provides for the option to receive chat messages through email when all team members are unavailable to man the live chat channel. This option is a great middle-ground between purely email support and 24/7 live chat.

Tip 6: Display Testimonials for Social Proof

Customers will not usually take your word as the best proof of the quality of your products. This is where social proof plays a big part. Let real-life users advocate on your behalf to show that your products are as good as you say they are.

Testimonials are a good way to convince potential buyers who are still on the fence about your product to know that you are credible and that you will in fact deliver on what you promise.

To maximize the credibility of your testimonials, they should feel like a real review of how your product has benefited the user. They should be relatable, and let readers feel like they are in the same shoes as the one giving the testimonial. To help show authenticity, try these out –

  • Use real pictures of your reviewers
  • Showcase each of their names, companies and positions
  • Make sure that there is substance to their testimonials – it should show an actual tangible benefit to the reviewer’s everyday life or business, and not just a general statement that the product is great

Tip 7: Nudge with an Appropriate Call-to-Action

With all the different details and information that a potential customer can consume while going through your sale landing page, sometimes there will be people who find themselves at bottom of the page not knowing what to do next. It’s your job to make sure this does not happen by using a great call-to-action to nudge the potential buyer to go back to purchasing mode.

Needless to say, the call to action must be appropriate. A good trick would be avoid leading potential buyers away from your sale page – don’t put Learn More links that could potentially distract from the road to conversion. Keep them on the sale page and always lead them back to your pricing section so they can have access to the Buy Now button.

Strategizing where to put your CTAs is also important. If you want your visitors to have a way to purchase right away you can have a CTA for Fast Buy Now button which skips viewing of cart and proceeds straight to checkout. This is good for customers who know what they want and don’t need to go through the extra steps to purchase.

Tip 8: Use a Great Theme

It’s no surprise that how easily you are able to build a new webpage will rest heavily on how great and easy-to-use your theme is. To support a great sale landing page, you should make sure that the theme allows you to easily and efficiently achieve the functionality you need and the great designs you want to implement.

If you’ve been looking for a great Gutenberg-ready theme, you may want to check out Blocksy, a fast and lightweight WordPress theme built with the Gutenberg editor in mind. It has a lot of options and is extendable and customizable so you can achieve some great pages using it.

Tip 9: Implement A/B Testing

You’ve poured in all your best effort to come up with the best sale landing page and website possible. You’re so proud of your work – you think it’s the best it could be. Is it though?

There are a lot of folks who often wonder why their website and sale pages are not converting as much as they expect, and sometimes the answer lies in A/B testing. It is always good to take your site for a good test run and see if tweaks here and there could mean the difference between a ‘meh’ and an ‘I’m sold!’. If you have not done this already, you need to go do it, and we guarantee that some results will surprise you.

The downside to A/B testing is it can be tedious if you do it all manually. Good thing there are tools out there that can help you automate this process. Try Google Optimize which is a great tool to use for A/B testing. You can easily find out which layout of your landing page generated more clicks or had a lower bounce rate. You want to make the most out of your sale so strategically planning where your sale information is placed is crucial to your success.

Tip 10: Maximize Your Newsletter

Your sale campaign does not stop with building your sale landing page – now it’s time to make sure people hear about your offering. A Newsletter campaign is one of the most effective ways to ensure a great sale turnout.

Having an email list is an absolute must-have, and your sale is the best time to put it to good use. Remember, your subscribers are there mainly because they want to learn more about you and what you have to offer. They already want to know about your sale so go tell them about it!

You should also be smart about how you run your newsletter campaign. Make sure that you’re able to segment your subscribers properly and to send them deals that are relevant to each segment. A good sample segment would be free users vs. existing customers. You can also have separate campaigns to existing customers to let them know about exclusive deals that are not available to the public.

Check out Mailchimp, which is an integrated marketing platform. It is a great tool to create and schedule campaigns for specific promotions and events. You can also have your special landing page linked to your newsletter to increase traffic and conversion for your sale.

Recap

So there you have it. These tips and tools will help you build a great sale landing page and make sure your holiday sale is a success. Let’s have a run down just for good measure. Ho ho ho!

  • Have a Great Sale Landing Page
  • Get Hosting that can Handle the Sale Rush
  • Have an Eye-Catching Pricing Table
  • Show a Sale Countdown
  • Use Live Chat to Respond to Sale Queries
  • Display Testimonials for Social Proof
  • Nudge with an Appropriate Call-to-Action
  • Use a Great Theme
  • Implement A/B Testing
  • Maximize Your Newsletter

Disclaimer: We may earn a commission from the services and tools mentioned above